Tag: xi jingping

And Then There Were Three: War Over Taiwan is Inevitable

There’s Ukraine, there’s Gaza and there will be Taiwan.

Not “may well be”. Not “it’s a question of when, not if”. There will be a war in and over Taiwan.

Or that, at any rate, is Mike Studeman’s take. And who, you might wish to ask, is Mike Studeman?

Mike Studeman was the former commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence and director for intelligence (J2) of the Indo-Pacific Command. He is a member of the National Bureau of Asian Research advisory board and is MITRE’s first national security fellow.

Source: https://warontherocks.com/2024/04/china-is-battening-down-for-the-gathering-storm-over-taiwan/

Please read that article in its entirety, to understand why he says war is inevitable.

My top five takeaways from that article – and the reason why I end up agreeing with him – are below:

  1. Xi is 70 years old, and he has only “ten reliable years of vitality to conduct a major operation and then lead China through the inevitable multi-year recovery from anticipated international retribution”. You might say that he might well leave that job for his successor, but if you truly believe that, you underrate the ego factor when it comes to macho leaders. Maybe I overrate it, but I don’t think such a thing is possible.
  2. Watch “Wag the Dog”, and listen to the album on loop. The movie is well worth your time in the context of the article we’re talking about today. The album has nothing to do with anything, but you could do far worse than listen to a Mark Knopfler album. My personal favorite is a song that lasts for all of 1:36, and it is called Just Instinct.
  3. His (Xi’s) economy is likely to continue its dramatic backsliding even if war doesn’t take place. In other words, his logical reaction when faced with a flailing economy is to say “My Father What Goes?” re: invading Taiwan. And so the chances of an invasion go up, not down, with a weakening Chinese economy.
  4. The world’s best response is to have “deep magazines of long-range fires and more forces forward — especially many small, mobile, lethal, persistent, and uncrewed types”. This will not increase the chance of war, the author says, but dissuade Xi from starting one.
    In other words, from a game theoretic perspective, upping the stakes is the best move the rest of the world can make. How can that be true given pts. 1,2, and 3 above? Well, I said “best” response. Not “logical”, not “most likely to obtain peace”, but best.
    Let me be clear: I disagree with Mike Studeman – it will increase the chance of war. But I also agree with Mike Studeman – it is the best possible response.
    Real female dog, game theory.
  5. His administration is designed to wage warfare, not administer:
    “Leadership changes at the 20th Party Congress in late 2022, for example, turned the Politburo into a body more akin to a war cabinet. Fifteen of its 24 members now have Taiwan-related experience. Included in this cadre is the most recent former eastern theater commander — the general responsible for executing a Taiwan fight — who was leapfrogged to the Politburo without being a prior member of the Central Committee.”

Is attainment of ongoing economic growth and prosperity an end in itself? Or is it the means to a “higher” end?

Asking for a friend, as the kids put it these days.

More on Mental Models

One of my favorite blogs on China just got a new name…

… and the author, Andrew Batson, also published a new post. recently. It is of interest in and of itself, but given that I just wrote a post myself about mental models, it makes even more sense to talk about it today.

Andrew’s post is about a simple question: “What should we make of China’s recent and dramatic policy reversals?”

As he points out, there has been in recent times an abrupt reversal of China’s Covid containment policy, a relaxation on years of restrictions on the real estate sector, a ‘softer’ approach towards internet firms, and while wolves aren’t turning into kittens anytime soon, they don’t seem to be baring their fangs quite as much.

China is clearly adopting a slightly different stance along many different dimensions. Andrew Batson asks why this might be so.

Four key possibilities, he says:

  1. These are short-term political adjustments by Xi, in response to the changing, extremely fluid situation. Pure pragmatism in response to what the situation demands, in other words. But Xi is still Xi, and his ambitions remain intact.
  2. Xi isn’t optimizing for the long term attainment of his most important goals. Being in power for the long term is his goal. And if he can remain in power by changing the type of dictator he needs to be, so be it. Power isn’t the means to an end, it is the end.
  3. The eventual goals remain what they always were – national security and technological self-sufficiency – but he now has a new team that advises him on how to ensure that those goals are met in the long term, but by minimizing short term risks. Essentially the first point, but the cause isn’t Xi himself, it is his new team.
  4. Xi remains a leader in name alone, and the actual decision making is now being done elsewhere. This begs an obvious question, but Andrew Batson doesn’t answer it in this post.

Andrew Batson himself thinks that it is probably some combination of all of the above. He’s not denying the possibility that it is any one of these in isolation, but thinks that some weighted combination of all four is the most likely.

Time to ask oneself some questions:

  1. What probability do you attach to these scenarios yourself? Here’s one possibility: a twenty percent chance of any of the four, and a twenty percent chance for all four combined. How does that grab you?
  2. Me, personally, I’d say a combination of 1 and 3 is the likeliest – maybe 60% put together. Give another twenty percent to pt. 2 and divvy up the remaining 20% between pt. 4 and ‘all of the above’. How does this sound? (Have fun drawing up the Venn diagrams here, by the way!)
  3. If your numbers look different, why do you think this might be? What books, blogs, vidoes, podcasts, tweets and news articles do you have in mind when you make your assessment? What sources do you think I (let alone Andrew Batson!) might be using?
  4. Are our insights actionable? How so? Can we use these assessments to guide our financial decision-making? Can we use these assessments to decide what to read next? Whom to read more of? Whom to read less of? What questions should I be asking ChatGPT basis my assessment?

One short article, but so many questions to think about!

As Studwell Puts It, Chinese Medicine

I end every single class that I teach with a request to my students: ask me five random questions. The topic can be anything under the sun, but please get into the habit of asking me (and indeed everybody else!) questions.

One question that usually pops up in the course of a semester is this one: “If you could recommend only one book that all of us should read, which would it be?”

It is impossible to answer a question like this, of course. But still, it is a fun game to play. And if the class comprises of an Indian audience (which is usually the case), my answer almost always is How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell. It is an eye-opener of a book about growth in North-Eastern Asia (Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) during the latter half of the twentieth century, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. I’m not the only one to be head over heels in love with that book – here’s exhibits A, B and C.

But the reason I bring up Joe Studwell today isn’t such a happy one. He also writes a blog((the intro to the blog is exemplary writing. And what is it with economists and homes in Italy? First Mundell, now Studwell.)) – updated only sporadically, it is true – and the blog is full of useful articles to read about topics that he is interested in. And today’s post is about a New Yorker piece about Xingjiang that he shared the other day.

And it is not, to say the least, pleasant reading.

Usually, I would have excerpted from it and added my own takes, but not today. Please, go ahead and read the whole thing.

Speaking of those random questions, “Why can’t we be more like China?” is also usually one of them. My usual answer is to say “be careful what you wish for”. The New Yorker article only serves to reinforce that point.

Again, please. Read the whole thing.

Row: Links for 18th December, 2019

  1. ““If a Chinese would come this road is done in a month,” explained Kenyan real estate entrepreneur George Hinga in a 2017 Vice China documentary. “With the Westerners,” he added, “the bureaucracy to get this approved would take a year, first of all, without any construction. I mean, why partner with the West?””
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    China full speed ahead in Africa.
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  2. A classic example of the seen and the unseen, from China and her implementation of the one child policy.
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  3. “In our prison example, for OPEC, and with the trade war, what is good for the group is not necessarily the individual’s “dominant strategy.” And that is why OPEC nations don’t necessarily listen to production quotas and the U.S. and China continue raising tariffs. Each one’s dominant strategy relates to their opponents rather than the benefits of cooperation.”
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    Elaine Schwartz on the USA, China and the prisoner’s dilemma.
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  4. “Xi sees that development economics as a discipline was largely created by Western economists using their own economies as a model, rather than being an indigenous creation of developing economies. “
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    Andrew Batson on a very early essay by Xi Jingping.
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  5. Speaking of unintended consequences…(with reference to number 2 above)

Links for 22nd February, 2019

  1. “We seem somehow bored with thinking. We want to instantly know. There’s this epidemic of listicles. Why think about what constitutes a great work of art when you can skim “The 20 Most Expensive Paintings in History?”I’m very guided by this desire to counter that in myself because I am, like everybody else, a product of my time and my culture. I remember, there’s a really beautiful commencement address that Adrienne Rich gave in 1977 in which she said that an education is not something that you get but something that you claim.

    I think that’s very much true of knowledge itself. The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it.”
    Have you heard of Maria Popova? This interview helps you understand who she is, and her importance in combating what I linked to a couple of days ago – David Perell’s article about the Never Ending Now.

  2. “Thanks to government backing, the state-owned company building the bridge is unlikely to default or go bankrupt. But bridges like Chishi leave local governments and developers struggling with debt, and those who live below nonplused.“If you don’t build roads, there can’t be prosperity,” said Huang Sanliang, a 56-year-old farmer who lives under the bridge. “But this is an expressway, not a second- or third-grade road. One of those might be better for us here.””
    The New York Times on bridges in China – and how there might be one too many of them. Economists have worried for many years now about how China’s economy will slowdown in the years to come, and also about how China’s economy has masked it’s imminent slowdown by building bridges, roads and entire cities when the immediate need is not apparent.
  3. “Turns out the reason was likely the same as the one behind every one of my life choices: it involved the least effort. As Frankie Huang, a writer and strategist based in Shanghai, told me over email, numbers are far easier to type for purposes like websites’ names, as compared to pinyin, the Romanised system for Chinese characters.”
    …speaking of China, Mithila Phadka explains why the Chinese prefer using numbers evreywhere possible – even preferring to use numbers rather than text for URL’s. 12306.cn is preferred to ChinaRail.com, for example.
  4. “In Study the Great Nation, you can catch up on the latest state media reports on Mr. Xi’s decisions, savor a quote of the day from Mr. Xi or brush up on “Xi Jinping Thought.” You can quiz yourself on Mr. Xi’s policies and pronouncements, or take in a television show called “Xi Time,” which is … well, you get the picture.Doing each of these activities can reward users with “study points,” which can be redeemed for gifts in future versions of the app.”
    I worry that China won’t be the only country doing this for very long – far too many leaders in far too many countries are likely to be tempted to be, um, inspired.
  5. “This conclusion, if it withstands open-minded analysis in India, does not mean that India lacks ways to punish Pakistan and motivate it to demobilize groups that threaten to perpetrate terrorism in India. Rather, it suggests that more symmetrical and covert operations would yield a better ratio of risk to effectiveness for India. There are many ways to make Pakistani military leaders conclude that the cohesion, security, and progress of their own country will be further jeopardized if they fail to act vigorously to prevent terrorism against India. Limited, precision air strikes are not India’s best option now or for the foreseeable future.”
    This is from 2015 – but as of that point, this rather well researched article points out that India may not be able to carry out precision air strikes against Pakistan – because of the threat of escalation, because of the technology available with Pakistan today, and because other ground based options may be more operationally feasible.